Why This Aspie Hates Phone Calls

I hate making phone calls.

Reason 1: Social Cues Not Available: In a phone conversation, I can't see the other person in realtime. I have to rely entirely on their tone of voice, distorted by low-fidelity sound, to try to read the subtext of their words. I can't use expressions to try to give them subtext to my words either, and subtext is hugely important to most NT people. They don't care what I say, it's how I say it and what my body is doing when I say it that make the difference between me implying something and me asking a question, to their minds anyway. They are very big on Implications.*

When I talk to people in person, I can watch their physical reactions to my words, my tone and my posture. I can use my acting, pose my body and shape my face to show them, in their nonverbal language, that I am not attacking them or accusing them or demeaning them by asking questions or saying facts. I can't do any of that damage control over a phone. They get mad. They get offended. They get annoyed.

*The only exceptions have been a few people in my life who are fully aware of my autistic tendencies and how they impact my life, and are accepting that I usually say only what I mean, and do not get offended easily by things I say because they know I Don't Communicate Like That. I can talk to them on the phone. Hearing them properly is very hard, but they don't "read into" anything I say or how I said it.

Reason 2: Low Fidelity Sound vs Precision Hearing = auditory processing problem.
"Eyyuh, cah I spee to th-hed or dis houshull?" is what I hear when someone on the phone says, "Hi, Can I speak to the head of this household"? Phones do not transmit high quality sound, and people do not bother to enunciate better while on the phone. Consonants get smashed. D, T, P, B, and C sound identical. Vowels get distorted. Certain accents or speech cadences mean whole words vanish.

Because I have an autistic mind, I do not hear a sound and then have the luxury of having my brain automatically fill in the missing gaps. NT people seem to hear only what they expect to hear. They can probably understand crappy noises as familiar words because their brains most likely hear the sound, "Eyyuh", and process that like this: We don't know what that sound meant but it was similar enough to "Hello", so that's what it was. Yes. The person said Hello. If you then ask them what was said, they won't repeat it as "Eyyuh," their brain has told them it did hear "Hello".

My brain doesn't do that. I have exceptionally sharp hearing, largely because my brain cannot parse what I hear into familiar shapes. I hear exactly what sound is made, and my brain does not simply pop the sound into an easy word-category automatically. "Eyyuh" to me, sounds like "Eyyuh", not "Hello".

In order, then, to understand anything said to me on a phone, I have to be constantly translating the garbled noises I am hearing into actual speech, which involves a lot of anxious guessing. I have to do this WHILE I am listening to the other person's words, tone, context and scanning it all for implications of subtext. It is a tremendous strain.


Reason # 3- Phone conversation = All-consuming effort.
In person, I can talk to people while I do other things. To make a phone call to anyone who is not very tolerant and accepting of my ways of communicating, I cannot be moving around or doing anything else. Handling the above-mentioned subtext problem I have talking to most people, and auditory processing issue of using a phone, AT THE SAME TIME, takes all my mental focus. I have to stop anything I am trying to do in order to have a phone conversation. I cannot talk and drive. Or walk. Or eat. Or work. Or fold clothing. Or pick up my room. My day and life must be brought to a total HALT in order for me to have any but the most simple exchanges over a phone, because I can't handle sensory input and decisions while I am already so overburdened by the effort a phone call requires of me.

I can only use the phone and multitask doing anything when I am talking to the very few people who do not require me to analyze their speech for subtexts or motives, and who do not do that with mine, because they know my conversational style and accept that while everyone else they know does that, I generally don't. I only do it sometimes out of habit of having had to talk that way for so long with most other people. It is exhausting.